DO YOU DRIVE FOR UBER OR LYFT? DO YOU USE THESE SERVICES?

 Posted on February 14, 2024 in Auto Accidents

These days, you either works for these services or use them. It is very easy to get signed up to work for these services and even easier to use them. What happens when you or your driver are in a car accident?

Well, regular car insurers have made it very clear that they will not cover the gig worker who is driving their personal car for their jobs. If you ask the gig worker how their insurance works, as I often do, they are wholly unable to explain if they are covered. This is not surprising. Most people from smartest to dumbest cannot explain their car insurance. Insurers like you to be in the dark because it helps them save money or screw you in common parlance. Insurance is a necessary evil.

But, let’s say you are driving for Uber, you are on your way to pick up a fare, and are hit by someone running a red light.  Pennsylvania law requires you to carry at least $50,000 bodily injury per person and $25,000 for property damage. If you actually are carrying a passenger, then you have to carry or uber/lyft has to carry $500,000 for death, bodily injury and property damage. This is far better coverage than the state minimum of $15,000, which is embarrassingly low and not terribly helpful for anyone.

Continue Reading ››

LOST WAGES

 Posted on February 14, 2024 in Auto Accidents

So, you are driving your uber eats car along and you are hit by another car. What are your lost wages? Well, basically, you will have to show what your past uber eats wages are and that you are physically unable to work further. That is really hard to show unless you are undergoing surgery with persistent problems after surgery. The law says we can prove lost wages without an expert for past lost wages or wages from the time of crash to trial so that is not terribly difficult.

But, what if you are working under the table? Can you claim these losses? Nope. That is the risk you take in not paying taxes. You cannot document this income in any way, so it cannot be asserted as a loss. End of story there.

What if you are self-employed? These are the hardest legitimately claimed losses to collect. Often, the self-employed person has some documented wages but a lot of their losses come from not being able to put time into the business. The small business losses often come from jobs that the owner missed out on getting because they were recovering from their injuries. These are nigh impossible to prove.  And, nigh is being generous.

Continue Reading ››

OFF TO GO SKIING

 Posted on February 14, 2024 in holiday

I am off to Park City, Utah to hit the slopes with my family next week. Skiing is a hobby and something that global warming has seriously affected. Out west, they have crazy amounts of snow right now. But, along with the awesome pow, it seems that there are some awesome lift ticket prices too.

I know that it is an expensive sport and a tough business for the ski operators, but still, the prices are rather surprising.  $120 to ski at camelback in the poconos is a bit painful. At least they have snow out west.

Skiing is a bit like golf without the practice. it is a lot of fun under the right conditions, but unless you live out west or in Vermont, it’s a very expensive day or week.

To me, there is nothing more fun than dropping in on a challenging black diamond, meeting your kids at the bottom in one piece with a good sweat going, followed by a cold beer and a nap after about ten runs.

Continue Reading ››

EXPERT WITNESSES / LAWYER WRITING

 Posted on February 08, 2024 in Case Matters

Every case of mine needs at least one expert witness because my client and I are not allowed to say that an arm was fractured or a herniated disc herniated without a doctor saying it. Them’s the rules. So, I spend a decent amount of time and effort reading the experts’ reports both from my side and the opposing side. The content of the expert report matters. The presentation of the report does not usually matter too much, but it bothers me when an expert has too many typos.

It is not hard to say to an expert, you did not read your report before you sent it out did you? Or, you did not list my client’s deposition in your report, so you did not read it. Or, you called my client Sally, him, etc.  She’s not a him is she? No, she’s not. It opens up a raft of semi-aggressive cross on how the expert is just doing this for the money, not for justice, how they do so many reports, they don’t have time to be careful, and who wants to listen or trust an expert who produces garbage looking reports.

Continue Reading ››

Highway Fatality and Truck Underride Cases

 Posted on January 31, 2024 in Auto Accidents

Periodically, there are terrible fatal crashes on our highways. You hope that you are never involved in them. As a lawyer who handles vehicle crashes, I encounter these cases periodically. I am working on a new case involving a drunk driver who killed his front passenger on a local highway after a night of drinking. The driver will likely go to jail for a decade or so.

How do these cases play out in the civil system? Well, first, in any fatality or near fatality there is a lot of police work done to document the aftermath of the crash. Someone may face significant jail time out of these incidents and hence documentation of what caused the crash is important. This is very helpful to me as a civil lawyer because there are lots of photos and measurements that eventually explain and document what happened. Often, the victims are either deceased or facing criminal charges. As a result, usually there will be no statements about what happened from the driver or passengers.  Sometimes there will be statements found in the medical records at the hospital. But, usually the facts don’t lie and generally the cause of the crash can be pieced together.

Continue Reading ››

Go/No GO

 Posted on January 31, 2024 in Case Matters

Deciding whether to file suit on a case is often just a business judgment on my end. Based on having done this for 20 year plus, is this a case that is worth putting into suit? Recently, I have had the difficult conversation with clients in two cases that simply did not make sense to put into suit. What does this look like? Well, let’s say you sign up a client and their liability or negligence claim is okay but not great. Perhaps the way that they fell is a little questionable, or the car crash was maybe 50% their fault. In those cases, I don’t usually want to file suit because there will always be a defense and defense lawyers eat that stuff up. But, explaining that to a client is tough and usually the client will be pissed at the lawyer, even though the case will get harder not easier once suit is filed.

The insurance company usually recognizes that the case is weak and makes a commensurately crappy offer. So, the client is faced with a lawyer who wants to drop their case and a poor offer. On the other side, in a strong case with strong facts, clear negligence, and solid injuries related to the incident, insurers will make decent offers seeking to get the case resolved before they must make real payments later on.

Continue Reading ››

IT’S SLIP AND FALL SEASON AGAIN!

 Posted on January 23, 2024 in Slip and Fall

Don’t let this happen to you!

Some call it winter, but for personal injury lawyers it is a good way to fill out your early season case load goals. Some may ask are these really cases? The answer is an unqualified YES. Why? Well, generally people with cases will have fractures from their falls and fractures are really indisputable as to what caused the injury. Often, people come to me with videos showing the police and EMS workers slipping as they walk across the parking lots in their work boots.

As you may know from my prior writings, personal injury lawyers do not do well by taking cases where both negligence and causation or injury is disputed. It is just too hard a fight to take and is not good for business and will not result in a happy client.

So, what is a good slip and fall case? Well, during snowy years, people slip and fall on commercial properties and often in commercial parking lots due to negligent snow or ice maintenance. If you fall and fracture your lower leg and need surgery as a result of a fall on ice, your case is going to be worth over $200,000 and the proof of negligence is the only issue.

Continue Reading ››

TRIAL NOTICES

 Posted on January 23, 2024 in Case Matters

Editor Note: You have to dig deep to find an interesting Trial Notice image.

When a case is getting close to trial, the Courts will let us know by sending out a trial notice. When I was a younger defense lawyer with an oversize volume of cases, this would start a panic at the office as we struggled to make sure everything was ready for Court.

As a plaintiff’s lawyer, while trial notices are not my favorite mail, they do present a chance to really dig into a case and see if the case can settle or if it has to go to trial. Usually, Courts outside of Philadelphia County are fairly flexible with scheduling of trials.  Courts in every county allow us to put in conflict letters telling the Court that we will be on vacation on x days and unavailable. As long as both sides are wiling to accommodate each other and the Court is agreeable, the case will get to trial eventually.  The Court does not usually care too much as long as both sides are moving towards settlement or trial. In federal court, the judges and the system is more geared towards forcing litigants to trial on the Court’s own schedule and less accommodating of our demand and needs.

Continue Reading ››

Interview with a vampire…. Or anti-vaxxer

 Posted on January 18, 2024 in Uncategorized

 

Some years back there was a vampire movie called interview with a vampire.  Brad Pitt was the vampire. He was very well received among the living females in the movie but sucked the life out of them. I recently had to revisit this sense of being exhausted by a discussion after an hour talk with an unrepentant anti-vaxxer person or two. I had just given blood and played some tennis so maybe I was a little peaked. But, they are truly nutty and exhausting.

How does this relate to the law? A lot of what I do involves trying to assess how a jury or your average person would look at a particular situation. So, how do you account for the anti-vaxxer crowd on your jury pool? It is hard to weed them out. I ran a few focus groups pre-covid and there was a single angry white male who would always blame the victim in my cases where victims are usually blameless. After hearing his opinions on three different cases, they began to sound predictable and I ended up not inviting him back. But, his type of mindless anti-vax question everything mindset is corrosive and difficult to weed out.

Continue Reading ››

No Free Bites

 Posted on January 18, 2024 in Case Matters

Dog bite cases trouble insurance companies because it is very hard to question the dog about his motives. I say his because I have never had a female dog bite a person. I’m sure it happens all the time, but not in my case files.  Dogs can do a lot of damage or a little damage depending on the dog and size of the person.

If you are a mail man and get bitten, that seems a little bit like a known occupational hazard to me. That is not to say that you should get bitten.  However, first it is a workers compensation case, so the post man is compensated for lost hours and medical bills. But, usually dog bite punctures to adult post men are about the lowest payout or recovery on the sliding scale of injuries to clients. The highest recovery would be to a young person bitten on the face.  The next are severe injuries regardless of the person’s age. Finally, multiple punctures on a child are valued more highly than punctures to an adult. There is a general understanding that adults should be able to deal with the dog bite punctures a lot better than the child should who is more likely to be traumatized and literally scarred for life.

Continue Reading ››